Yoshida: Early PS4 Reviews Disappointing, but Confidence Still High

Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida has reacted to the initial roster of PlayStation 4 reviews, telling our friends over at Games Industry.biz that he’s somewhat disappointed with the first batch of scores. Despite this, though, the mixed reaction hasn’t dampened the executive’s excitement for the impending console, which he believes will usher in a “transitional generation” of technological and networking advancements.

“It’s disappointing to see some of the low scores,” he told the publication candidly. “I haven’t spent enough time reading the reviews, but I would characterise them as mixed. And with this launch there are lots of games coming out, so the media must be very busy going through the games quickly, and especially since the online functionality wasn’t ready until in the last couple days. So we have to look at how much time they spend on what aspect of the games and how that may be contributing to some of the lower scores.”

Despite the disappointment, Yoshida still believes that players will have fun with the initial roster of games. “I’ve played through all of our games – Killzone: Shadow Fall, Knack, and Resogun – and I totally enjoyed playing through these games,” he said. “I’m now on my second run of Knack and Resogun at a higher difficulty – these games really grow on you when you play more. I’m very confident that once you purchase these games and play, you’ll be happy that you’ve done so.”

Of course, the man in charge of PlayStation’s entire first-party network is likely to say something like that – but he does later admit that the company never expected Japan Studio’s platformer to be especially well received. “Knack wasn’t designed [to meet specific] review scores,” he explained. “The game uses only three buttons to play, so it’s not the type of game reviewers would score high for the launch of a next-gen system. The game was targeted as what we call a second purchase.”

In other words, it’s the type of title that you’ll also pick up alongside the likes of Battlefield 4 and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag – and Yoshida believes that it suits that purpose well. “This is a game that you can play with your family or your significant other,” he continued. “But it’s a great game for core gamers as well, because when you up the difficulty level it becomes a really tight, tense action brawler. The goal was to design it to be played by anyone, even someone who’s never played before.”

While we appreciate Yoshida’s honesty, we think that he’s letting the lower scores pull him down a touch. Despite the rather poor Knack scores, both Killzone: Shadow Fall and Resogun performed very well barring a few outliers – and fortunately the executive still believes that the PS4 is in a very strong position. “The PS4 generation is going to be the transitional generation,” the suit said. “In a sense, it’s the completion of the evolution of the strong 3D capable consoles, but at the same time it’s at the maturing phase of our network platform and the beginning of our new service phase, like our cloud gaming that we are preparing to launch next year.”

He concluded: “So all that considered, and the difficulty we had at the launch of the PS3, and very strong competition especially in North America, that made us really revisit everything we’ve been doing and redefine the company, almost like we’re re-entering this industry. Even across our teams, I think you now get more consistent messages [about PlayStation] compared to past generations, because we talk a lot more and get a lot of input [from all the teams] on different decisions.” And what a difference it's made.

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User Comments (22)

Seems like there's some kind of witch hunt going on for Knack. When I played it a couple of weeks ago it suprised me. I wouldn't say its as bad as some reviewers are making out (probably a 6/10 game from what I played) I think most of the flak comes from the fact its not a AAA launch title and was never designed as one

@ZeD As much as I love Yoshida's honesty, I think these comments are exacerbating an issue that doesn't really exist. Yes, Knack reviewed poorly — but Killzone and Resogun did fine. I think this is a case where a little less honesty would have actually helped. The company may have expected 8s and 9s for Killzone, but aside from Polygon, it did great. And Resogun has been pretty much universally praised. It's no where near as bad as these comments make out.

Regarding Knack (from what I have seen so far) it is indeed a pretty basic and somewhat boring game. Especially if you compaire it to the "last gen" new Ratchet game. We knew that it was a game designed for younger players, but still it could... no should be much better than this.

@3Above I doubt that! knack to me always looked like it would be boring and charmless and I don't see how everyone is thinking it looks like a Nintendo game seriously look at the new Mario game compared to knack and tell me which looks more fun to play@get2sammyb yeah Polygon's review what a joke I can't believe it got a 5 but anyway I think if you like killzone you should pretty much know what to expect and like shadowfall I'm looking forward to this sites review of the game

I really think that its all going fine so far. Besides that, form a financial point of view, look at knack. Its surely nowhere near the development costs of a "big game" and will be picked up by plenty, like he said, as a secondary purchase. Just think about all the parents getting a PS4 for their kids for christmas, I bet they rather take Knack with the console (just based on the cover art) than a Battlefield or Call of Duty. In a cost VS reward scenario I guess Knack will do fine and yeah the most hate PS4 gets is from MS fanboys really. And again Im stating that there is not really ONE game without flaws on Xbox One, all are running sub framerate or sub resolution or don't even have all their content done yet.

So I guess everything's fine.

And by the ways, if Nintendo finally does a few things right, they deserve it. Think about Nintendo what you want, but they DO know how to make great Software (Hardware and Marketing not so much...).

@Lelouch it looks nothing like any other Mario's though I can see the nsmb games being the same thing over and over which I do like anyway but this one looks nothing like that or galaxy or the smb3d for the 3dsKnack looks like your doing the same thing throughout the whole game and looks just as bad as that ryse game for the xbone another turd if you ask me

As with anything most people will focus on the bad. Yeah Knack isn't very appealing, but games like Killzone more than make up for it, infact the quality of the console and the price make up for it, they're losing money with each sale for God' sake.

@Lelouch Knack looks more fun to play than the new Mario?? Wow you really do have a strong bias. Knack looks about as fun as a cardboard box. Lets wait for review scores to determine which is better. You also said COD was not competition to Killzone... Sony is great but not everything they do is always going to be the best

@eLarkos"Lets wait for review scores to determine which is better"So you use an opinion to back up an opinion to combat an opinion thats different to your opinion? is @Lelouch not allowed an opinion different to your own?

@MadchesterManc Lelouch is absolutely allowed an opinion and quite often has decent ones. Im also allowed to comment that I think his recent opinion is absurdly biased.

If an opinion is not the norm then it tends to be due to a factor of bias, whatever that bias may be. Lets use the aggregate review scores of mario and knack to determine the norm and then see how far off Lelouchs opinion is I.e strength of bias. Either Lelouch has a bias towards brown coloured repetitive adventure platformers or Sony.

Also, only people thay don't play mario games say that its the same game rehashed over and over. The characters are reused but the game play is significantly different.
Mario at the olympics is slightly different to mario world /s